Why Linear is Winning the Experience Game
Part 1 of a series on excellent local first applications and what it takes to make them
Two years ago, I was in our office in Lehi, Utah when one of our coworkers suggested we use Linear for productivity. I immediately deflected the comment as changing our task tracking would almost certainly be more of a distraction than a help.
I’d worked with JIRA, Clickup, and a half dozen others.
A half year or so after that I got the chance to use Linear and I was extremely impressed.
It was simpler, smoother, and cleaner. The UX was excellent. They delivered new features frequently. Offline worked out of the box. This was different.
From a technology perspective, how did they support this? It felt like this just came out of nowhere but in reality, this had been coming for decades
Where Did this Come From?
A company is really just a front for the people that create it. In this case, the 3 founders of Linear all have fascinating stories but Tuomas Artman is particularly interesting.
He’s the face behind the magic that supports all of those intangible features of the Linear product. The app is so responsive and it all comes down to one piece of technology: a sync engine
Being inspired by their great software, I began to wonder, how he was able to accomplish this.
Upon further investigation into articles, videos and podcasts about Tuomas and Linear, it turns out, has has spent a career refining this skill.
Linear’s excellence is a result of that tireless passion to reinvent himself and his craft.
Getting in Sync
Tuomas wrote a sync engine for a game company, Groupon, Uber, and now at Linear. You’d think by the time he got to Linear, that this process of improvement would feel complete, but that was not the case.
His first two prototypes used third party services that they grew out of quickly due to feature and cost limitations.
The custom engine that he ended up building was reworked 9 or 10 times.
Excellence Takes Time
It’s inspiring to see such hard work over a long time pay off. The products that we use everyday, that we love to use, are the result of years and years of people tirelessly working at their crafts.
he things that made Linear excellent started way before I had brushed into it, and likely a decade before the company even existed. Tuomas didn’t realize that Linear was going to come from all that work. He was just fascinated by the process of making a great software.
The reason Linear is an excellent product, comes down to years of practice and patience by those who built it.
The next article in this series will be about the actual mechanics of the sync engine itself.
Below are a series of excellent articles, videos and podcasts I used to research this content:
Initial design and architecture of the Sync Engine (2020)
Improving the Sync Engine for Performance (2023)
Podcast reviewing Linear’s sync Engine with Tuomas (2024)
Open Sourced version of Sync Engine at Uber
Gergely Orosz Excellent Interview with Tuomas Artman (2022)
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Thanks for reading!
I’m Paul Hovley. I’ve been a software developer for the past 10 years and was CTO of a dev shop that was acquired. I’ve always told people that I want to be more giving with my time so I’m trying to live by my words better and doing something I believe in. I’m working 20 hours a week to pay the bills while I try my hand at building something for people. The app I’m working on is ebb.cool. Check it out!
Ebb is a desktop app to help minimize distractions during important times of the day when you are trying to create. If you’re interested in helping we have a 100 or so creators in our Discord that are passionate about being better. If you’re also passionate about self improvement and focus, we’d love to have you. Look forward to hearing your story!
